Staff Writer

ELKINS — Davis Health System officials gave a presentation regarding innovations in local healthcare during Thursday’s bi-monthly Randolph County Chamber of Commerce meeting.

Dr. Mindy Chua, chief medical officer at DHS, specifically discussed population health and the steps DHS is taking to better improve the health of the local population.

“We’re trying to increase quality, decrease cost and improve patient and provider satisfaction,” said Chua, additionally stating that the top goals at DHS are quality and safety, employee engagement and sustainability.

“Population health is really just paying attention to — not just each individual patient who walks in our door — but all of the patients in all of the counties that we serve and how to better improve the health of our population,” she added. “What we want to try and get to is providing the highest quality care and service, and service to our patients, making sure that what we do is knowledge-driven — not just because we’ve done it this way for a hundred years.

“They say right now that medicine is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has changed in the last hundred years because of technology innovation. So, if we aren’t nimble and innovative, we are going to fail. We have to make sure that we can keep up with those changes.”

Chua emphasized that “the only way to be successful is to put people in positions where they will succeed” and that, in order to transform healthcare, there is a need to shift from provider-first to a patient-first focus.

“(Medicine) will never be defect-free, but we want to get to the point where we’re as close to that as we can,” she said, adding that DHS is looking at quality assurance on a daily basis.

DHS has taken several steps to improve population health, which include annual wellness visits for Medicare patients, chronic care management for patients with three or more chronic medical conditions, transitional care management, diabetes education classes, “No Cost Clinics,” the Grace Davis Residences, and the potential for a food pharmacy at DMC.

“In order to keep care local, we made the choice to build a new vault,” said Boyce.

Updated technologies in the new facility include a new, large bore CT scanner, which will aid in serving a greater patient population, and a top of the line TrueBeam Linear Accelerator, which will provide a type of high-precision radiotherapy treatment that was previously unavailable in the Elkins area.

The next Chamber of Commerce meeting will take place at 8 a.m. on Oct. 23 at the Wood Tech Center in Elkins.